Stress has a bad reputation. You’ve probably heard that it’s going to kill you, or at least damage you in some way. Should you be working on it? Should you be trying to manage it? Just thinking about the consequences of stress is enough to make you feel … really stressed!

Stress gets a lot of bad press, but stress can actually be a good thing. In fact, we need stress in our lives. Without the stress of opposing gravity, for instance, our muscles and bones would quickly begin shrinking and the muscle and bone cells would be replaced by fat cells. Astronauts rapidly lose their muscle mass and bone density as they experience weightless and the absence of gravity — in other words, the absence of stress. The same thing happens to those who are hospitalized or are on bed rest for any reason.

But maybe that’s not the kind of stress you were thinking about. Mental stress is actually useful, too. If your brain didn't undergo the stress of learning and adapting to a changing environment, you would have a decline in your cognitive or thinking skills.

Every time you experience something new, every time you have a challenge (positive or negative), every time you have to work to figure out a problem, you are growing the connections in your brain and preserving your brain function. That’s all good.

But here’s the tricky part, and the way in which stress actually can be damaging: both physical and mental stress require regular periods of recovery. When we stress our muscles and bones with a vigorous workout, the cells sustain micro-damage. The body responds with inflammation that will repair that cell and make a cell that is more vigorous (stronger).

However, without that rest, the repair and subsequent strengthening cannot happen. If the stressful workout fatigues the cells every day, they will not strengthen as effectively, and can even break down over time. This is why exercise trainers advise working out muscles every other day rather than daily.

The same thing holds true for the brain. Vigorous challenges need to be followed by periods of rest, so the brain can repair and strengthen, forging its new connections and essentially physically internalizing the benefits of the new experiences and information.

The normal response to stress is the production of hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. When these are released, the human body becomes faster, stronger, and has more acute vision and hearing, to best master the challenge, defeat the threat, or flee effectively.

This is a survival mechanism. The body is then meant to quickly process the stress hormone and return to an idle state. But when there is a continuous and unrelenting elevation of stress hormones, those hormones remain circulating in the system long after they should be gone.

The continuously elevated levels of these hormones cause all sorts of disruption to the thyroid hormones, sex hormones, growth hormones, insulin levels, and more. Blood sugar goes up and stays up. Insulin levels disregulate. Our bodies don’t put sufficient energy into those normal functions we are meant to undergo when at rest, like digestion, hormone manufacturing, toxin elimination, and damage repair.

As a result, continued stress makes us less effective, and less healthy. Inflammation continues to rise, toxins stay in the system, hormones get more and more imbalanced, and we are at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, mental health problems, dementia, and autoimmunity.

Too many of us have our stress response activated all of the time, or engage in physical training programs that do not provide sufficient rest time for the cells to repair from the work out. Nearly all of the patients I see suffer from lack of adequate relaxation response, in both their muscles and nervous systems.

So you can see what the real problem is here. It's not our exposure to stress, which is necessary for maintaining our health. It is the absence of getting back to the idle state or the absence of an adequate relaxation response. We are meant to face challenges in our life, but we are also meant to be able to recover quickly from the threats so that our bodies can go back to doing all the maintenance and repair work required by our bodies and our brains.

So what do we do about it? Here’s what I teach my patients: don’t fear stress. Welcome it. Daily challenges, both physical and mental, build you up and make you stronger, smarter, and healthier. However, recovery is equally important and must be given a priority in daily life.

There are many ways to improve our relaxation response. These include moderate exercise, journaling, gardening, fishing, foraging, biofeedback modalities such as mantra-based meditation, yoga, or simply some time in nature to get back to the idle state each day. I ask my patients to chose activities that they enjoy, that match who they are and fit into their schedules, and to engage in a stress reducing activity every day, preferably a couple times a day.

Personally, I stress my body and my brain daily to ensure that my strength continues to improve and that my mind stays sharp. But I also engage in activities each day that will help me get back to the idle state and allow my body to repair damage from the physical work out, and to resume the maintenance and repair work that my cells need. I vary my relaxation techniques and I vary my physical and mental training programs as well, because I know that I need both stress and relaxation to be fully alive and to thrive. And so do you.

Terry Wahls, M.D.

Professor Of Medicine & Best-Selling Author

Dr. Terry Wahls is a professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical research on the use of diet and lifestyle to treat brain-related problems. She has also worked at the VA for many years in the traumatic brain injury clinic and was the director of the therapeutic lifestyle clinic. In both clinics, she focused on using diet and lifestyle to treat traumatic brain injury and neurological and neurodegenerative disorders. Time and time again she saw people experience marked reduction in pain, improved mood, and better thinking. She also saw that in her own life. She has progressive MS and for seven years, she declined steadily, and though she took the newest drugs, including very potent biologic drugs, she ended up in a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years. When she started studying the latest brain science and designed a diet and lifestyle program specifically to support my brain cells, her decline slowed, then stopped, then she recovered. She now bike five miles to work. She uses these principles to help others with a wide variety of brain-related symptoms end their decline and suffering and restore their lives. If you want to learn more about the protocols she used in her recovery, clinics, and research, visit her site. Pick up her book, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles, and the companion cookbook, The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life. If you want to dive even more deeply into what she does to help people reverse their decline and get their lives back, come to the Wahls Protocol® Seminar that I conduct each August.